My colleague Thom wrote an excellent evaluation of the European antitrust investigation of Google yesterday. I agree with much of what Thom says in his article, including the statements that the investigation isn't surprising and that it's fishy that the complaining companies have ties to Microsoft. What I don't agree with is the offhanded comment that Google has "pretty much a monopoly in search." There was a lively discussion on this point in the comments, but I thought that rather than join the fray there, I'd exercise my monopoly power and put my thoughts into an editorial.

Google is undoubtably successful; that alone rubs some people the wrong way. Fair enough, but don't make the mistake of thinking that simply because something is popular, in any degree, it therefore must be anti-competetive. Google's services are merit based. They do not back the market into a corner and they do they don't make it harder to use any other search service. Hell, their very own internally developed web browser, chrome, doesn't lock you into their search service. You can change the default without hardly even looking. The only real way, matter of fact, that they would make it even easier is if they inundated everyone with pop ups repeatedly asking if they wanted want to keep using google as their search engine. They don't interfere with any other search engine's methodology. They don't leverage their own services in manipulative "all or nothing" bundling schemes. Video searches aren't partial to youtube. They don't punish you in any way for fiddling with any other competitor's product.

Every time you go to google or use a google product, you're free then and there to use it or not, of your own free will. If you decide to go another route, it's a piece of cake and there's nothing standing in your way.